Reflections from Colin Campbell on Peak Oil and ASPO

Question: Please reflect on the evolution of ASPO and your evolution of peak oil thinking. Maybe you can start by touching on your studies while in the industry.

Campbell: My interest in peak oil goes back a long time. Of course it was not initially identified as peak oil. I was asked by the company I worked for to make a study of Columbia in 1966 and in the course of doing that I looked all the different basins of Columbia. I saw how many wells had been drilled, what they had found, what the underlying geology delivered and even then, as long ago as 1966, it was evident that there were certain limits. Some areas not yet fully explored were very promising and indeed they

Later in 1969, I was part of a team with Amoco in Chicago which was instructed to make a world study. I did Latin America and other people did other areas around the world. Back then we more or less figured out the limits of the on-shore, we didn